


Like a Bright Exhalation in the Evening, part 7

by raedbard



Series: Like a Bright Exhalation in the Evening [7]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-07-31
Updated: 2006-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:14:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there is desire in darkness and remembrance of things past, domestication, and dreams through hope, reborn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Bright Exhalation in the Evening, part 7

**Author's Note:**

> This part goes from '17 People' to 'Two Cathedrals' with flashbacks to the first days of the campaign and the first part of this story. Again, you'll know (I hope) where things fit, but I haven't signposted them overtly.

1.

But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them.  
In the eyes of the unwise they did appear to die: and their departure is taken for misery  
And their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are at peace.  
For though they be punished in the sight of men, yet their hope is full of immortality.  
[Solomon 3:1-4]

He had said: you don't get to know everything.

Toby tries to work out the progression, the descent of magic, its dissolution; one of five things. He stands on the balcony, holding back the tears. He feels the nick of his nails against his forehead as his fingers rub there, over and over, impossibly lost. He thinks of Sam, and knows that Sam will be the last and that he will resent every moment between Toby's bite of this bitter apple and his own. He wishes he could extend the time; he wishes he could go home and pour the confession out onto Sam's skin. There are dark things in this night, in the air, and he cannot remember hope, only the anger that takes him. It fills him, full across his chest and a weight on his back. Toby feels as though he cannot stand straight. He feels every heartbeat in his throat, as regular as the lie of these last two years. They are no longer free.

Anger binds them both hard around the chest. Toby watches the President's eyes glow with fury, body stiff. Toby watches his hands shake, a little, in the moment after the briefing books fall from the desk. He almost smiles at the irony. His own body shifts, the movement closed and broken. He can remember the resistance of the air as his hands cut it through. He spits his accusation, fills the Oval Office with the sound of his own voice. Leo is forgotten, standing by their sides. If Toby looks at him, if Bartlet looks at him, they will have to renounce their anger, be brought back into the world. They look at each other instead, at the carpet, at the seal, at the desk. Resolute, adamantine. Toby listens to his own breathing, feels anger lift his chest and push out the air. As he watches Bartlet leave the room, Toby decides that he no longer believes in magic.

"I have no intention of apologising to you, Toby."

(_You don't deserve my apologies, no part of me belongs to you. I have no need that you can meet. You are not free._)

"Would you mind if I asked why not?"

(_I did this for you, I can't help needing you. This is the last battle and if you can't fight it, if we resign this kingdom, I can't ever be free again._)

Leo is still beside them. His face is pale, almost translucent and his hair seems darker in the lamplight. Toby wants to apologise, if only for Leo, if only to try to straighten his back and pull some colour back into his face. Bartlet gets there first:

"I'm sorry, Toby, I really am."

He nods, and doesn't know how he feels. The fall has come, it is all that's left.

They cheer when he walks in. He wakes up in time to catch the ball. Josh is grinning at him, then turning to speak to Donna, who looks pissed. Ainsley is in the middle of a peach, holding in it her left hand and a book open in her right. A joke book. When he looks at it and smells the sweetness of the peach, Toby feels sick. Sam is standing by the fireplace. He looks tired but he does not look broken, not yet. He smiles at Toby, throws one of the pink rubber balls at him and very nearly hits him square in the mouth.

2.

Hope is formed in the taste of a man, his shape on the tongue, his weight a mountain in this embrace; this man. Sam lets Toby write poetry on his body, through his back, through the press of his hands hard onto his spine. They are not his own words. Toby's body covers him, fills him, soothes him even in sharp thrusts and the clash of hips and loins. After it has started he can't stop to wonder what has changed, he cannot think beyond this coming together, this new thing.

Toby came to bed bearing the Correspondents' Dinner speech in his hands. It improved with him, read like a speech and not a funeral, even though Sam never did make him laugh. It went on the credenza and Toby's notebook followed it, from out his shirt pocket. Sam watched as he loosened and then pulled at his tie, slipping the tail from the knot. Toby stared back, and his eyes were black, full. They moved down Sam's body, more than half uncovered from the sheet and waiting; he stared at Sam's neck and the bridge of his shoulders, the arc of his hip. He unbuttoned his shirt with steady hands, revealed the white line of his undershirt covering the curve of his belly. The lamp still lit on the credenza glinted off the chain always around his neck. His wedding ring shone as he removed it, but disappeared against the wood of the table. His eyes fell from Sam's when his hands went to his belt buckle, shifted, pulled. He turned and stepped out of his pants, then threw them across the chair where his coat used to lie, in the months before. His boxers were blue, the ones Sam likes. When Toby came to him, into the bed and Sam's embrace, he whispered, "Okay."

There is anger between his lover's body and his own, hard fluid fury in the space between them. Something Toby won't tell him, something he can see anyway. It crackles as their skin touches, as Toby's fingers grip his jaw. Sam hates his secrets yet he cannot but yield to their weight, to Toby's weight between his thighs and the weight of waiting these six months, these two years.

His hands went to Sam's neck, thumb in the hollow there and his fingers curled around his jawline. He kissed Sam's mouth and sighed into the space, light, then harder, with his hands holding on to Sam's shoulders. Sam shifted, yielded and let Toby move him, pressing his hands down over Sam's collarbones. Sam could feel his erection, hot to his inside thigh and under his hands when they went down and Toby did not pull away. He put his hands down into the darkness there, and Toby shifted his hips, balanced by shin and elbow, and turned himself into Sam and allowed him passage across his body. They sat up, legs tangled and Toby's breathing heavy in the silence. Sam pulled at the undershirt, stroked his fingers up Toby's arms to get them to raise up, then lifted the shirt over Toby's head. He smiled, curled his hand around the curve of Toby's neck and kissed him. Sam pushed him down to the pillows and covered him with weight and touch and let Toby's eyes close and forgot that the months between this touch and the one before and all the rest, and kissed his lover gladly.

Though he lies on his back he is not submissive, though he allows Sam his pleasure it is a temporary indulgence. He throws his head back and bares his neck, pale and tender in the middle of wrath. When Toby raises his hand to his forehead, rubbing hard, it sounds to Sam almost as though he's crying, or trying not to cry. Sam is sure it is not his touch that causes the high hitch in Toby's breath or the small cry that thrills his throat. Sam puts his hand over Toby's neck and feels the pull of a deep breath under his fingers. It is all Toby has; no words left.

He put his head to Toby's belly, to the warmth that is always there. He has slept against this solid curve many nights, tonight his hands found a slip of smooth hairless skin that leads down, inside. He put his tongue there, he listened to Toby's moan and absorbed the restlessness in this body he found he loved, and tried to still it. He curled his fingers inside the waistband of Toby's shorts, middle and index fingers first, and pulled. His palm catches the heat of Toby's erection, the heel of his hand there and his fingers curled. Toby's face all lines and darkness and the opening of his mouth. He lifted himself from the bed on his elbows and his shoulders seemed very broad and full of shadows. Sam bent his head down between Toby's legs, tasted. It was done then.

There is a kind of desperation, blank and black and three steps ahead in Toby's body, in the way he holds on to Sam with his arm around Sam's waist, hard, inflexible. Toby fucks him steadily, as a timepiece, holding on, every thrust a beat. Toby fucks him like the summoning thump of the rubber ball against their window. Toby holds him much too tight, white knuckles, a lifeboat in a rainstorm.

Toby wouldn't let him finish. A minute, perhaps two and Sam held Toby's hips hard and made his mouth tender and wrapped his arm around Toby's thigh and let the cries come. He was close when he started pushing against Sam; a fist balled against Sam's forearm, the square of his knee forced in before Sam's shoulders. He twisted his hips out, away, and let Sam's mouth slip from him, slick. Sam hadn't the time to ask or wonder; Toby took him by the hips, rolled him forward onto his face. Toby's hand followed up his back, keeping to the curve and passed up his neck, fingers played into Sam's hair. It turned Sam's head so he could breathe and pulled down a pillow under his hips, too soft. Toby's hands ran to his hips, stroked there, finding soft places and points that give out shudders from Sam. His hand matched curves, caressing. He kissed Sam at the small of his back, mouth soft and beard scratching. Sam lifted his hips, waited.

Sam feels the poetry of small things: the caress of his thumb along Sam's hip, a tiny spot of constant warmth in Sam's skin; the honest redness across his neck and the sweat standing between the cords and the cool touch of his chain to Sam's back; the pale circle around his finger where the ring should be. Sam thinks of the notebook he keeps hidden and phrases and images that he will never have occasion to use outside this room or in the secrecy of this bed. Words he will never say.

His thumb came first, found the hollow and rubbed there, wet with come. Sam knew it wouldn't be enough, that there would be pain. He fumbled the tube into Toby's hand and his neck ached as he twisted round to look at him. His hips ached and his back too but he could feel those old kisses, the hand in his hair. The memory hid the edge of pain and he allowed Toby's thumb, his slick finger, two, three. Wet, and easier with each stroke, the pain only at the edges. He waited a little longer. Toby's cheek dropped against his back; a pause, a breath, one kiss.

He curled over Sam's body, one arm underneath his chest and the other matched to his thigh, arching it up. Sam closed his eyes when Toby came into him, easy, then fast, hard, slick, high, higher. His back took all Toby's weight, his hips all the force, and Toby's arms curled both around him and held him as he let go. It was done. It is done.

It is done in the final touch of their mouths, both breathless. Sam has no secrets, spilled his last a minute ago. He says _I love you_ again, after the orgasm, to prove that it is not just pleasure talking. Toby has new secrets, not only the ones he has failed to speak to Sam, but he murmurs _yes_. Whether he does so to acknowledge Sam's words or claim their meaning for himself, Sam is not sure. But there is something different, a new answer.

Toby seems to want him close afterwards. All the anger is gone from him, for now, in this place. He lies close to Sam, allows Sam's arm over his chest. Toby kisses him, over and over. His mouth seems to ask for peace, but Sam doesn't quite know how to give peace to this man whose body presses against his so hard. He touches Toby but cannot make him stop. He tries to hold him still. He shoves an arm in between Toby's chest and his own. No peace comes until he takes Toby's head in both his hands and pushes him away, hard. His lips are red, his eyes very dark. Sam holds him. Sam holds Toby's face at rest against the curve and hollow of his own neck, still. Eventually, he quietens.

"What changed?" Sam asks as they are falling asleep, his head on the pillow next to Toby's and his fingers in Toby's beard.

"Huh?"

"What changed, Toby?"

"Nothing."

"Why are you lying to me?"

"I'm not."

Sam laughs, a little. The sound is muffled against Toby's chest. "What happened?"

"Nothing. Nothing happened. It was all done already."

"What the hell are you talking about, Toby?"

"Don't worry about it." He leans over, kisses Sam's forehead and then his mouth. He is tender, one hand stroking Sam's cheek. "It's done now."

"Toby, what's wrong?"

"Nothing. Just a bad day."

*

The next night runs to the same pattern, almost. The anger hanging around Toby, filling Sam's day in the West Wing with thunder, falls away as they walk home, step by silent step. Toby is quiet, only speaking when Sam speaks first, acquiescing to the groceries Sam picks out in the store, even the peanut butter Sam knows he hates. His only addition is a small bottle of Jack Daniels; no cigars, no candy. He has disappeared onto the street outside before Sam is done at the checkout. Because it is dark already, because the neighbourhood is quiet, Sam allows his hand to slip up to Toby's elbow, a small stroke, electric.

"You okay?" Sam asks him, as they begin to walk.

"Let's just go home, okay?"

They go home. They eat, a little; Sam more than Toby. They don't talk much and Sam knows that Toby is not thinking about the night before. Sam does a little work at the kitchen table, still punching up the tax cut speech, still clogged with words that aren't working on the paper. Toby brings him coffee and goes to sit at the corner of the couch, resting his chin in his hand, brooding. Sam can't afford, right now, to worry why.

When the fourth draft has been saved (even though he hates everything about it) Sam yawns and stretches, arms high above his head. and turns in his chair. He watches Toby for a minute.

"I think it's bedtime now. For me at least. You coming?"

He nods, blinking as if to clear his thoughts. From the look still covering his face, black and closed, Sam doesn't think it worked. He watches as Toby stands, a little unsteady.

"You should have eaten more," Sam says.

"I don't think housewife is your natural calling, even though that was a fine impression of my mother," Toby says, in an undertone.

Sam grins. "Come on."

In bed, Sam tries to take the darkness in his hands. Toby shifts, uncomfortable. Sam strokes his hands down Toby's thighs, pressing against tender muscles and soft white skin. He holds Toby with his own weight, pressing him back-down on the bed until he cannot fight against submission anymore, until his eyes close and his frown slackens. Sam kisses him then, and feels the gasp in his own mouth.

It is not Sam's first time, but it is new enough. He lets Toby's leg arch up against his chest, his side and shoulders against Toby's inside thigh. Toby's skin is paler than his own here, and the hair is black. Sam spends long minutes kissing there, fascinated. He knows, has known for a long while that he isn't meant to think Toby beautiful, that he should see exactly what the others do. But he lost his clarity a long time ago. He is smiling as he dips his head deeper down between Toby's thighs. He rises and falls in time with the buck of Toby's hips and he swallows down the words that rise in his throat when he looks up and sees what release looks like on his lover's face. He is glad he knows now.

Toby falls asleep quickly, sprawled over the bed. Sam fits his chest to Toby's back and tangles their legs together. His kisses the back of Toby's neck and thinks about whispering: _sleep tight_, but does not. He strokes Toby's hair and shoulders and smiles when the touch releases some tension, when Toby shifts back against him, easier. Sam goes to sleep with his face to Toby's neck and his erection pressed to Toby's back. It subsides; Sam dreams.

The pattern continues for a little under a week. Sam feels the secrets grow around him, both at work and at home, but he trusts; they will tell him when he needs to know. He eats, works, writes, calls his father at the weekend, sleeps beside Toby and gets him off easily, with his mouth and his hands, and lets Toby's dark fingers return the favour. He forgets that soon there will be an anniversary that he would rather not celebrate and does not inspect his scar in the shower. He learns Toby's body and his pleasures; he writes unbroken prose in the notebook with the creamy white pages. He hoards the time.

But each night Sam sees that Toby's eyes are becoming darker, their light slowly lost, and he writes that down too.

3.

"I'll be here in the office when you're done."

When he comes back, as he does; brought back with a promise he had not known he would need, he seems very young. The fall of idols seems to bring youth back to Sam, as though the force of the king's humanity throws him back to hope and outside adult reason, still believing like a boy. As he looks at him, Toby can hear Bartlet's soft voice and Sam's soft replies, polite, guarded. Now his eyes are gleaming at what Toby had taken into himself like the death of kings. He wants to know what they do to go on; Toby doesn't know what to tell him. Each breath from Sam, heavy in his throat, asks _how_ and _when_. Toby remembers that his own questions had all been _why_, and rubs his fingers against his forehead, eyes half-closed. He stares at Sam, who survived his own fall, faith intact.

He is angry too. The flush shows across in cheeks in red marks, as though someone has slapped him. Toby stands behind his own desk, his hands clamped hard on the chair back, and waits. Sam stands in the middle of the room and he does not move for many minutes. His hair falls over his face, obscuring his eyes, the red of his mouth hidden by the tilt of his head. Toby goes to him - around the desk in a moment, holding out his hand. Sam grabs hold. When he tries to remember later, Toby cannot see who pulled the embrace forward first, who chose. Both their arms wrap around very tight, bodies pushed together. He raises Sam's chin, kisses him. His eyes are dry.

"You okay?" Toby asks.

"Not really, no."

"Give it some time."

"You knew last week, didn't you?"

Toby nods.

"And that's why?"

Toby nods, keeps his eyes to the carpet.

Sam nods to himself, then laughs, toneless. "Do I know all the secrets now?"

"You still don't get to know them all."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"You know why, Sam."

"I wish it'd been you."

"Not if you'd been there."

"What do we do now?"

"What we can."

The best answer he can give Sam is the stillness of his body; no lie in the shrug of his shoulders, nor evasion in the pass of his hand across his head. Sam nods, mouth set. He smiles when Toby tells him the password. He says, "Shouldn't it have been 'Gemini'?"

*

Sam realises on the night before, against the shift and turn of Toby's body, that he knows something the others do not. He can still find hope in his hands, in the words. He asks them not to plead for defeat, to put away the white flag of surrender. Today is not it's day. This is the job they have been given, all of them from the President and Leo on down, and he believes in their capacity. There is no point in being angry anymore. He stares at the President, standing with his back to the door and his arms braced to the Resolute desk, and considers that those capacities may well be limitless.

This is the job they have been given and its duties still make a point of light for Sam. He carries faith like dust in his pockets. He watches the others. He speaks and is shouted down. He holds his Bartlet button in his hand and watches the broadcast and listens to the storm clash against the windows. He finds Toby in the crowd and knows he still believes.

*

"Well, what do you believe in, Toby?"

Sam had asked him, one night at the tail-end of an argument Toby had been sure he was winning, in Manchester, in the snow. He won all their early arguments, but Sam had always come back for more. The campaigns kept them arguing all night, no resolution after a bottle of bourbon between them - Sam gulping down his share, grimacing. He looked so unreasonably young then, always in a white shirt, rolling his sleeves up as the level of the whiskey dropped. Toby half hated him, at the beginning.

"Freedom," he had said.

"Shouldn't you be a Republican then?"

"No, not freedom from taxes and seeing poor people in the street, Sam!"

"Well, define freedom."

"Read the Constitution some time."

"You know, Toby - you can give me a hard time for as long as you like, but we're in this together, you know? We want the same things."

"We do, huh."

"Yes, we do - setting the world to rights, being a force for good. Among other things."

"And reeling off clichés?"

"Isn't that why you're here? To try to do good?"

"Listen, Sam - you've been here two months, the Governor barely knows your name, and I only know your name because you keep coming here and bugging me. You don't _know_ anything. You're a lawyer."

"I know a great man when I see one, Toby. And I know a king-maker too."

"Clearly, you also have some kind of chronic short-sightedness."

"Why do you do that?"

"What?"

"You're not a loser, Toby. Stop acting like one."

"You don't know anything, Sam."

"I know enough. Josh told me the rest. You think this is your last chance? You think that the Governor is your last chance to be someone, your last chance to win. And maybe he is. But I've heard you speak, I've read the things you write. I've seen you sitting over there with a pad and pen, in the middle of the night. I could never do what you do. You make magic on those pages, Toby. You're a king-maker. Forget all the other stuff."

"The Governor isn't going to keep me on, Sam."

"You don't know that."

"Yes, I do."

"He needs you, Toby."

"No."

"You only can't see it because you need him more. We all know that; we're all the same way. Why can't you see that?"

"And what are you?"

"I'm sorry?"

"What are you in our little family, Sam?"

"I'm your partner," Sam had said, and walked out of the room.

*

Toby had been half asleep, half drunk, half frightened of what was begun with Sam's hands holding his head upright and the memory of words on a page. The subject of Sam's two hundred had been liberty, the essence of American freedoms and its responsibilities, its challenges. He had not been surprised by the clarity, nor the bright belief that shone in Sam's clean sentences, but he had not expected the strength he found within the lines. Sam's mouth had been hard against his own, then soft and wet. Sam had whispered his name so softly that Toby found the sound of his own moan covered it. Sam's body had been heavy against his own sleepiness, and Sam had smiled and kissed the tender places where Toby could feel his own heartbeat pounding. He had remembered words that they would win on, and pulled Sam closer.

He had whispered Sam's name on the concrete at Rosslyn and found that CJ's cry covered the sound; he did the same against the smash of a bottle against the wall of the Mess. He had not known before he read the words, his own and then Sam's. He had not known until he heard the softness of Sam's name in his own mouth in the middle of sirens and gunshots.

Toby knows that tonight is the night that something ends; the world is turning again.

*

In the car on the way to the State Department, none of them speak. Leo and the President are visible as dim forms in the car up ahead. Toby sees Bartlet turn his head as they pass National Cathedral and wonders if he should be afraid of the god of his god, who does not belong to him. The car races, and the journey is not smooth. They sit in silence, Josh on the right, Sam in the middle, Toby on the left. As they begin to slow and the rain falls thicker on the windows, Toby feels Sam's hand slip over his own. It's warm and still wet from their brief first step into the rain. Toby quietly turns his own hand palm up and lets Sam thread their fingers together, squeezes tight; partners.


End file.
